FBI agent Manny Tanno thought he had left his tribe and the Pine Ridge Reservation behind him years ago. But now with a cold case unearthed in the hot desert sun, he knows that the past never really goes away.

In Badlands National Park, there is a desolate area the Lakota refer to as the Stronghold. General Custer called it hell on earth. During World War II, the Army Air Corps used it as a bombing range. At the end of the war, many unexploded ordnances were swallowed up in its sweltering sands. But that’s not all that’s buried there. . .

Some seventy years after the war, the Sioux tribe has contracted an ordnance removal company to defuse any remaining ammunition in the Stronghold. When the company finds a human arm near a live bomb, Tanno and the Tribal police are called to investigate. As the body is exhumed, two more are discovered. The remains are close together, but the murders were decades apart—and the story behind them is about to blow up. . .

"Storytelling at its best."

Margaret Coel, New York Times bestselling author of
Buffalo Bill's Dead Now

"An exciting and quirky mystery that seamlessly shifts between past and present, offering a number of finely delineated characters and a strong sense of life on the reservation and the beauties of a hostile land."

When Lakota FBI Agent Manny Tanno wrapped up his last case, all he wanted to do was put an end to his reluctant homecoming and get away from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation—So why did he decide to give up his cake job as an academy instructor back in Washington, D. C., and take a permanent assignment to the Rapid City, South Dakota, field office?

It might have been his hot new girlfriend: But she’s giving him the cold shoulder. It might have been his promising new protégé: But he’s burning out before Manny’s eyes.

Manny almost finds himself going through the motions in his latest case, as the investigation uncovers one, then two, then three old skeletons in a derelict car on a defunct World War II bombing range in the Badlands. He certainly can’t count on any cooperation from his childhood rival heading the tribal police department, stonewalling him from all sides. And the local media is making him a laughing-stock.

An emerging prime suspect turns out to be a popular and respected local judge. Being the first American Indian nominated for appointment as a U. S. Supreme Court Justice, everyone figures he’s in—as long as his people can make sure some nuisance FBI agent doesn’t ferret out the skeletons in his closet.

To top it off, skeletons in Manny’s own closet threaten to end his career—if not his life. Now his estranged brother, the convict-turned-holy-man, might be Manny’s only salvation from the increasingly terrifying visions. In the most desolate corner of the nation’s most destitute reservation, Manny Tanno might just find himself offered up as the next dead body in the forsaken Badlands,where the bad rocks live. . .